Playwright Noah Haidle’s Broadway debut is all about time and yet none was on his side as the pandemic closed in.
Rehearsals for his play “Birthday Candles” were in their second week in March 2020 when his career achievement was snatched away. He had to become Zen.
“It became a private satisfaction. Any outward validation is quite nifty, but it doesn’t matter,” he says, thinking at the time: “I believe in the quality of this, and it’s immaterial whether people see it or not.”
People are finally seeing “Birthday Candles” and cheering its cosmic look at time, ritual and memory, a play that connects baking a cake to “atoms left over from creation.”
The play visits and revisits one woman and her loved ones on her various birthdays as she ages from a rebellious 17-year-old to a 107-year-old great-grandmother. It stars Emmy Award-winner Debra Messing.
